Prefix WhoIs Server Software

Prefix-based whois server for network operators

Prefix WhoIs displays the Origin-ASN and other interesting information
related to the most specific prefix currently advertised within the
Internet's global routing table that corresponds to the IP address in
your query. This package provides two main components to make this
possible:

The 'pwhois-updatedb' program downloads the global routing table
from a router or route-view server of your choosing and stores this data
(about 220,000+ prefixes, and over 5 million unique entries (from some
route-views)) in a PostgreSQL database. With a cron script this
data can be updated at an interval of your choosing, however we recommend
not more frequent than every 4 hours (to be considerate of the route-view
server from which you pull the data). pwhois-updatedb is smart enough
to merge the data and expire records that are no longer in the global
routing table, so this provides some limit to the amount of disk space you
will need.

The 'pwhoisd' server process serves up this information to clients over
the whois protocol (port 43/tcp). In addition, the pwhoisd daemon supports
some new query types and output formats including its own internal pwhois
format, Team Cymru's output format (see www.cymru.com), and RPSL (RFC 2622)
for further compatibility. pwhoisd also supports bulk queries for integration with other processes,
including Layer Four Traceroute (LFT), which is popular with network engineers.